still time. Poor child, when I think how we have tormented you to learn
what you know, and how industrious you have been! And now--to what end?
I ask you, to what end? The great gulf will swallow up one and all."

"So be it, so be it !" cried Gorgo interrupting her. "Then, at any
rate, nothing that I love on earth will be lost to me before I die!"

"And the enemy will perish in the same ruin!" continued Damia, her eyes
sparkling with revived fire. "But where shall we go to--where? The
soul is divine by nature and cannot be destroyed. It must return--say,
am I right or wrong?--It will return to its first fount and cause; for
like attracts and absorbs like, and thus our deification, our union with
the god will be accomplished."

"I believe it--I am sure of it!" replied Gorgo with conviction.

"You are sure of it?" retorted the old woman. "But I am not. For our
clearest knowledge is but guesswork when it is not based on numbers.
Nothing is proved or provable but by numbers, but they are surer than the
rocks in the sea; that is why I believe in our coming doom, for, on those
tablets, we have calculated it to a certainty. But who can calculate
evidence of the future fate of the soul? If, indeed, the old order
should not pass away--if the depths should remain below and the empyrean
still keep its place above--then, to be sure, your studies would not be
in vain; for then your soul, which is fixed on spiritual, supernatural
and sublime conceptions, would be drawn upwards to the great Intelligence
of which it is the offspring, to the very god, and become one with him--
absorbed into him, as the rain-drop fallen from a cloud rises again
and is reunited to its parent vapor. Then--for there may be a
metempsychosis--your songful spirit might revive to inform